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How to heal a heart

An international team, composed of three Chilean scientists, published in Nature the first explanation of the causes and possible treatment of a new variant of heart failure, that it is affecting more and more people around the world.

If there is something that the biochemist Francisco Altamirano always wanted to, It was to have sufficient time to study the heart. Understand the secrets of its internals, the delicate cellular balance allowing you to fill with blood, then throw it in every heartbeat into all the channels that make possible the life of a body. By phone from Dallas, where researches for the University of Texas Southwestern, "nobility" uses the word to describe everything that makes the heart for us. Until you get sick.

According to figures from the American Heart Association, para el año 2030 más de 23 millones de personas habrán muerto por algún tipo de enfermedad cardiovascular, y 26 millones de personas en el mundo ya padecen una de sus formas crónicas más letales, heart failure, whose most common version - with reduced contractile function - is generated when the heart, because of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension or obesity, you lose the force it needs to pump blood throughout the body. A disease for which there is a cure but if treatment, However in the last two decades has given way to a new variant, against which science is just trying to give their first responses.

Heart failure with preserved systolic function is called (ICFSP) and its appearance around the world went on the alarms about how our life sedentary and bad food is affecting us as a species. Cardiologists and researchers, in fact, They speak of it as a culturally communicable "chronic disease", i.e., a disorder that could be considered contagious, by the bad habits that are transferred from parents to children. In simple terms, in the ICFSP the heart has not lost its physical contract and pump capacity, pero no es capaz de relajarse lo suficiente para permitir que la sangre ingrese en él. Esta enfermedad representa hoy el 50% de los casos de insuficiencia cardíaca en el planeta.

Francisco Altamirano comenzó a estudiarla en 2015, When he began his post-doctorate recommended by renowned Chilean chemical pharmaceutical Sergio Lavandero, que llevaba más de cinco años haciendo estudios del corazón en la Universidad de Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas. Next to him, the Italian cardiologist Gabriele Schiattarella and the American Joseph Hill, they began to wonder how the heart was affected by the ICFSP, a disorder that if well seems to have clear causes - communion between diabetes, hypertension, obesity and high cholesterol, What, Unlike in the past, hoy es común encontrar a la vez en un mismo paciente—, It had not been understood at the level of its biological mechanisms, There was no treatment, ni tampoco un modelo animal para hacer experimentos, capaz de desarrollar la enfermedad para arrojar algunas pistas.

Stop that, they joined the team to Chilean nutritionist Elisa Villalobos, who participated in the research in the ICFSP mouse model. That achievement, essential to experience, He opened the door that would lead them to publish in the prestigious Nature, last month, the first convincing explanation of how it works in the heart disease. Essentials, explains Altamirano, fue notar que los ratones sufrían una pérdida de la función en dos proteínas claves para mantener su equilibrio: IRE1, que actúa como un sensor que enciende las alarmas cuando hay un desajuste a nivel celular; y XBP-1, que es la que tiene la misión de repararlo.

La causa detrás de esa pérdida, entendieron luego de una serie de experimentos con ratones genéticamente modificados para prender y apagar proteínas a voluntad, es un exceso de óxido nítrico en el corazón, produced by the inflammatory processes of the diseases that attack it. A condition that, However, He showed clear improvements when they returned to activate XBP-1 in mice, What could be the beginning of the road to a possible treatment. In fact, many of the experiments were replicated in human heart samples, Thanks to an agreement with John Hopkins School of medicine, Baltimore, with a substantial number of patients with ICFSP, en un país donde el 40% de la población es obesa.